He was arrested last December after police received intelligence that he had imported a head of a child sex doll.

Officers attended his home address where they arrested Plumb and seized a number of his electronic devices and a full size child-like sex doll.

Police uncovered around 2,000 indecent images of children on Plumb’s computers and phones.

He was initially charged with two counts of improper importation of an obscene/indecent article for the child sex dolls, and a further offence relating to the indecent images of children. However, upon review of the evidence the Crown Prosecution Service later dropped the charges relating to the sex dolls.

Today he was sentenced to a two year community order with a 40 day rehabilitation activity requirement. He was also ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work, given a Sexual Harm Prevention Order of five years and made to sign the sex offender register for five years.

Officer in charge of the case, Lucy Asadi from Wiltshire Police’s Child Internet Exploitation Team, said: “Throughout this investigation Plumb has repeatedly tried to minimise his actions and downplay his wrongdoing, deceiving others about the scale of his offending.

“Very often these types of offenders lie to others and themselves about the impact of viewing indecent images of children. However, we want to stress that these images depict sexual abuse being committed against innocent young children and that this is not a victimless crime.

“We want to reassure the public that we are actively investigating and prosecuting people, who view, download and distribute indecent images of children; we are working very hard to ensure they are brought to justice.”